The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Mandisi Majavu is the Book Reviews Editor of Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the co-editor of 'Visual Century: South African art in context Vol 4: 1990 - 2007' (Wits Press, 2011).
Some of his work has appeared in the anthologies: 'Real Utopia: Participatory society for the 21st Century' (Ak Press, 2008) and 'Beyond Borders: Thinking critically about global studies (Worth Publishers, 2006).
Mandisi Majavu -
As Noam Chomsky once wrote, the vocation of “historical engineering” is as old as history. White liberalism has developed this vocation into a science, and one of the tools that liberals deploy when carrying out “historical engineering” is ethnic solipsism. This is why today the French revolution is globally recognised as an important historical event, whereas the Haitian revolution is not foregrounded in the study of the development of the 18th century social...
Mandisi Majavu -
Before the 2009 general elections, political pundits predicted that a shift of black electoral support from the African National Congress (ANC) to Congress of the People (COPE) was inevitable. It was further pointed out that this shift was going to occur along class lines; we were told that the black middle class perceived COPE as the political party that could represent its class interest. Although COPE won about seven percent of the national vote in the 2009 elections, the internecine feud...
Mandisi Majavu -
For a man who spent ten years on Robben Island fighting against a white supremacist apartheid regime, President Jacob Zuma comes across as seriously ill equipped when talking about issues related to race and culture. Generally speaking, his views on race and culture are primitive.
Recently he’s been quoted in the media as having said, “Spending money on buying a dog, taking it to the vet and for walks belonged to white culture and was not the African way.”
Granted he...
Mandisi Majavu -
Frantz Fanon once wrote that the challenge facing civil society and progressive governments in Africa is how to organize African countries around values that promote and encourage participatory democracy, equity and mutual aid. Although most African countries gained independence from European colonial rule in the 60s and the 70s, that remains the biggest challenge facing the continent today.
It is for this reason that many political commentators expected the Arab Spring in North Africa to...
Mandisi Majavu -
Many sports journalists view Solly Tyibilika’s rugby career, the former Springbok player who was shot dead at a tavern in Gugulethu, as a waste of talent. It is said that Tyibilika could play like a champion if you could get him on the field. Loffie Eloff, a rugby coach, is quoted in the newspapers as saying that Tyibilika had “discipline problems”. “He’d just disappear for days, even weeks, on end.”
Tyibilika’s friends...
Mandisi Majavu -
Almost two decades into post-apartheid South Africa many black academics still feel that the “white networks that have de facto run academic decision making” are derailing the transformation agenda. This is according to the Charter for Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), a report commissioned by the Minister of Higher Education and Training, that was published in June this year.
In many respects, the CHSS echoes the 2008 Report of the Ministerial Committee on...
